The Cleveland Show: "A Cleveland Brown Christmas"Review

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Cleveland tries to set things right with Rallo.

By Ahsan Haque

Cleveland's asked to dress up as Santa Claus at his company Christmas party. After getting a little drunk, he ends up inadvertently telling Rallo that his real father isn't actually an FBI agent, shattering the child's paternal admiration. To make things right, Cleveland tracks down Rallo's father and tries to get the father and son to share a Christmas moment. Meanwhile, Roberta decides to become an animal rights activist and frees a reindeer, which causes mayhem all around Stoolbend.

Taking a classic family sitcom storyline and then turning it on its head seems to be the formula that's worked best for The Cleveland Show so far. This week's predicament of Cleveland trying to make things right with Rallo is a serviceable story concept, and serves as a decent backdrop for the myriad of zany events that unfold during the course of the episode. Cleveland getting drunk and ruining Rallo's heroic image of his father was simple enough. You knew that he felt bad afterwards, and would try to make things right. Of course Rallo's real father would decide to spend Christmas Eve at a strip club, and would need Cleveland to convince him that he should be there for his son. Rallo's been a bit inconsistent though. For a kid who's supposedly extremely intelligent, he tends to fall for whatever crazy story Roberta comes up with. It seems that the writers will turn up or turn down his street smarts as they see fit to help tell their stories.

The highlight of this episode had to be the whole background storyline with the reindeer. Immediately after Roberta decides that she's going to get inspired by Tyra Banks and get Cleveland Jr. to free the animal, the reindeer rewards Cleveland's rotund son with a few hoof kicks. The reindeer then randomly appears throughout the rest of the episode with a couple of really bizarre highlights. These include a bit where the reindeer is just salivating while staring into Tim and Arianna's bedroom window while the two bears were intimate. Arianna's tongue reaction was completely unexpected and absolutely hilarious. The other amusing reindeer moment was at the very end of the episode with the tackle and hump of Santa Claus. Again, completely unexpected and Santa's reaction was pretty funny as well.

There were a couple of funny Family Guy tie-ins this episode including a brief still image of Meg getting bombarded by snowballs being thrown by the Browns during the alternate festive opening credits. Also, we had that extended musical moment with Herbert singing "Silent Night" at a "homosexuals" Christmas Party that Cleveland once attended.

To the writers' credit, there weren't too many random manatee jokes, and the ones that were chosen were pretty funny. The Entourage bit with Cleveland meeting Adrian Grenier and telling him what he thinks about his body structure was pretty funny, and also memorable was the segment of the mock newscast featuring the toys from the Stoolbend model train holiday exhibit.

While it's not exactly the most memorable animated Christmas special, there were a few funny moments here, especially watching the reindeer cause mayhem around town. Things that don't work at all on this show are the musical numbers. They're just not as creative or as catchy as anything we'd see on Family Guy, and there seems to be far too many of them in this episode. Overall, it's a fairly average episode. Not embarrassingly bad, but nothing amusing enough to make you go back and want to watch the episode again.